This but actually. Don’t use an LLM to do things LLMs are known to not be good at. As tools various companies would do good to list out specifically what they’re bad at to eliminate requiring background knowledge before even using them, not unlike needing to somehow know that one corner of those old iPhones was an antenna and to not bridge it.
Yup, the problem with that iPhone (4?) wasn’t that it sucked, but that it had limitations. You could just put a case on it and the problem goes away.
LLMs are pretty good at a number of tasks, and they’re also pretty bad at a number of tasks. They’re pretty good at summarizing, but don’t trust the summary to be accurate, just to give you a decent idea of what something is about. They’re pretty good at generating code, just don’t trust the code to be perfect.
You wouldn’t use a chainsaw to build a table, but it’s pretty good at making big things into small things, and cleaning up the details later with a more refined tool is the way to go.
That depends on how you use it. If you need the information from an article, but don’t want to read it, I agree, an LLM is probably the wrong tool. If you have several articles and want go decide which one has the information you need, an LLM is a pretty good option.
if you want to find a few articles out of a few hundred that are about the benefits of nuclear weapons or other controversial topics that have significant literature on them it can be helpful to eliminate 90% that probably aren’t what I’m looking for.
This but actually. Don’t use an LLM to do things LLMs are known to not be good at. As tools various companies would do good to list out specifically what they’re bad at to eliminate requiring background knowledge before even using them, not unlike needing to somehow know that one corner of those old iPhones was an antenna and to not bridge it.
Yup, the problem with that iPhone (4?) wasn’t that it sucked, but that it had limitations. You could just put a case on it and the problem goes away.
LLMs are pretty good at a number of tasks, and they’re also pretty bad at a number of tasks. They’re pretty good at summarizing, but don’t trust the summary to be accurate, just to give you a decent idea of what something is about. They’re pretty good at generating code, just don’t trust the code to be perfect.
You wouldn’t use a chainsaw to build a table, but it’s pretty good at making big things into small things, and cleaning up the details later with a more refined tool is the way to go.
That is called being terrible at summarizing.
That depends on how you use it. If you need the information from an article, but don’t want to read it, I agree, an LLM is probably the wrong tool. If you have several articles and want go decide which one has the information you need, an LLM is a pretty good option.
if you want to find a few articles out of a few hundred that are about the benefits of nuclear weapons or other controversial topics that have significant literature on them it can be helpful to eliminate 90% that probably aren’t what I’m looking for.
Or you might eliminate some that are what you are looking for because the summaries are inaccurate.
Guess it depends on whether an unreliable system is still better than being overwhelmed with choices.